Self-defeating or Empowering? Opposition Parties’ Electoral Strategies in Poland’s 2019 and 2023 Parliamentary Election

“Democratic backsliding” has been deemed one of the major challenges to contemporary democracies (Bermeo 2016; Waldner & Lust 2018; Diamond 2020). Studies – resorting also to more general term like autocratization – have chronicled how ruling parties undermine democracies by manipulating electoral campaigns, violating civil liberties, reducing institutional constraints on the executive (Lührmann & Lindberg 2019). Individual and comparative case studies focused on Central Europe show how incumbents vary in their use of the “backsliding toolbox” (Buzogány 2017; Bogaards 2018; Sadurski 2018; Pirro & Stanley 2021; Hanley & Vachudova 2018). However, research on strategies of political opposition in the region to counter the contested policy changes has been rare and tended to focus on top-down interventions by the EU on the one hand (Sedelmeier 2017; Kelemen 2020), and the so-called Europeanization strategies of civil society organizations (Moroska-Bonkiewicz & Domagala 2023) on the other. Even though opposition parties are the only political actors that can take over power and actually stop the problematic developments, their strategies and tactics in the CEE countries have remained largely understudied. In response to this gap, we develop a theoretical framework that identifies strategies and corresponding tactics of opposition parties, and argue that the strategic choices opposition parties make, influence their nature and functioning, and hence have a great impact on the quality of democracy. Echoing Schattschneider’s dictum (1960:66) that the party which is able to make its definition of the issues prevail is likely to take over the government, we differentiate between reactive strategy, responding to institutional changes but staying in the conflict axis determined by incumbents; and pro-active strategy – aimed at regaining control over dominant conflict. The reactive strategy of opposition parties includes tactics such as outbidding and counter-polarizing discourse. The pro-active one contains organizational and programmatic adaptation and renewal. Subsequently, we argue that the reactive strategy distracts opposition parties from meaningful, fact-based control and from formulating a programmatic alternative beyond the anti-government stance. The pro-active strategy, in turn, drives opposition parties to develop capacities for control (adaptation of organization and leadership) and alternative (determination of a new conflict). Leveraging an original dataset of opposition politicians’ speeches, statements and interviews during the electoral campaign in 2019 and 2023 in Poland, this article examines and compares the strategies pursued by opposition parties and how they have influenced their key democratic functions, namely control and proposing alternative. Given the same institutional context that still allowed opposition parties to fulfil their fundamental functions of critique, control and offering an alternative, we argue that the chosen reactive strategy of the largest opposition party turned out to be self-defeating in 2019 and the mixture of reactive and pro-active strategies (and related tactics) have helped opposition parties become more convincing in 2023.